14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management

1st European Semantic Web Symposium

Information is all around us. Never has it been so easy to collect.
Never has it been so easy to store. Never has there been such easy access to
it. And yet this info-bonanza is seen all too frequently not as a boon,
but as a burden. The information you actually need is often concealed by
information that you don't need; it is covered by a blanket of info-smog. To
realise the opportunity of our information-rich environment, you need to extract
knowledge from information, value from the info-smog. New resources,
such as the semantic web, are the key to extracting the value from your
informational assets.

Let us define knowledge as usable information.
What does "usable" mean here?
If information is usable, then that information can be matched
with, and brought to bear upon, the particular problems your business
or organisation is addressing. And conversely, when you understand a
problem, that gives you an indication of the information you need to
solve it. To turn your information into knowledge, it is necessary to
understand the connections between it and your business processes. It
is necessary to understand what information to use when, how to find it,
and how to present it to the relevant people.

The trouble is, that is easy to say and hard to do. We generally lack
the capabilities required to transform our information into knowledge.
Put bluntly, we have information technology, but we don't have
knowledge
technology. If knowledge is to be managed effectively, for the good of
its owners (or custodians), then Advanced Knowledge Technologies will
have to be part of the solution.